Would you look at that! A brand-new chapter! During this hard time, I hope this helps brighten your spirits and gives you a respite from the craziness of the world. Enjoy!

The light filtered down through the blue water, casting gossamer curtains that blurred as the dark reaches of the ocean floor pooled upwards. It was beautiful to Sam. She hovered, floating weightless in the halfway world of light and shadow, buoyed up in the warm water. Fish flitted around and coral dressed the sandy floor in arrays of brilliant yellows and orange. It was a little slice of paradise. Ringing laughter drifted to her in the water and she let her body be swayed by the currents. The laughter called to her and she could just make out a figure in the distance, cast in shadow by a light shining from behind. A hand reached for her and she smiled as she reached out in turn.

'Sam…'

Gasping, Sam awoke in her bed, sheets tangled around her and her alarm beeping from somewhere on the floor. She had a bad habit of knocking it off her dresser. Groggy from a fitful night's sleep, she propped herself up against her headboard and tried to rub the sleep from her eyes. The dream had been peaceful. A welcome distraction from reality. Today was going to be a terrible day and it was only seven am.

"Honey?" her mom called through the door, knocking lightly.

"Come in, mom." Sam wiped at her face again.

Her mom, tall and with the same brunette hair, pushed the door open and walked to her daughter's bedside. "How are you feeling?" she asked.

Sam felt her eyes welling with tears before she could even stop them. A sob broke from her throat and her mom held her in her arms within seconds.

"Oh, darling." The older lady stroked her daughter's hair as she sobbed into her shoulder. "It's going to be alright. Everyone is looking for them. It's a small island, they'll find them. I promise."

Hardly listening, Sam continued to cry.

Yesterday had been one of the worst days of her life. First, word of Jess going missing had come in. Then Sean had disappeared. Lastly, almost like clockwork, Cody had also vanished just like the other two. The three missing teenagers had everyone on their island looking. Jess's found bike was the only clue so far, but that seemed to have led nowhere. There was no sign of them. No one had seen anything and no one in the town seemed to know where they could have gone.

The Griffin's were understandably distressed. Sam just as much. The three of them, including Jess's dad, were beginning to suspect that the kidnappings had a more specific purpose behind them. The three boys all had something in common…the secret of what Cody was. Sam was terrified for them and for herself. What if they came after her next? Who could have taken them? Were they alright?

The police were waiting for some sort of ransom note or a clue to be found, but nothing so far. The whole situation was terrible.

Shaking, but finally bringing her tears under control, Sam pulled away from her mom.

"I'm staying home today and I'm not letting you out of this house either," said Sam's mom. After a brief pause, and in a gentle voice she added "I'm going to start making breakfast, alright?"

Sam nodded her head slowly, sliding back down under covers and pulling them up to her chin. Kissing her forehead, her mom left her room, shutting the door behind her.

Slightly calmer, Sam tried to direct her thoughts away from Cody, Jess, and Sean. Her dream drifted into her thoughts and she frowned. Usually when she dreamt of swimming, she was in some sort of pool or at a swim match. Rarely was she in the ocean. And who had that figure been? They had felt so familiar. She had been trying to grab their hand…

She shook her head and pulled her covers over her. After a few moments, exhausted from crying, she drifted back to sleep.

The water was different this time. Still just as gorgeous, but the coral had given way to rocks and sea fans. Under water caves covered in anemones sat on her one side, while a field of sea grass waived in the ocean current on the other. That same, familiar laugh reached out to her. This time, she purposefully pushed herself towards the sound. Was it a sound? She heard it again. Sam couldn't tell if it came to her through the water or if it was simply there, in her mind.

Swimming, she pushed herself forward, easily slicing through the grass, surprised she didn't need to surface for air. The laughter was getting closer and she smiled. She knew that laugh but couldn't place the owner. Who was it?

Crossing through the other side of the grass, she found herself in a starfish studded clearing. All around her sea creatures swam and played. Small fish darted around and through her hair as it waved in the soft current. Brilliant light filtered down from above and she looked up, holding her hand above her eyes to block the light. There, towards the surface, a figure swam down towards her. Once more, their hand reached out for her.

She had just grasped their fingers when the water darkened, and the temperature turned ice cold. The fish scattered and suddenly the figure was being pulled away.

'No!' She screamed, her voice coming from her mind rather than her mouth.

The figure struggled, tail flailing as they were dragged back to the surface.

'Sam!'

Jerking awake, Sam screamed with her mind. 'Cody!'

It was Cody, she just knew it!

With a cry, she flung her twisted covers away from her and stood from her bed, only to have to sit back down as a raging cough worked its way up her throat.

"Sam?" her mom pushed open her door.

Sam coughed, heaving as her lungs ached.

Her mom returned with a glass of water, sitting next to her daughter and rubbing her back as she gulped it down. The coughing subsided, but Sam still felt thirsty and her throat was raw and sore.

"Oh dear, all this stress and worry is making you sick. You should go take a hot bath. That will help. After that come downstairs and eat something, please. It's nearly afternoon and you must be starving," said her mom.

Sam opened her mouth to speak, but another cough came out and she hid her mouth in her sleeve as she waited for it to subside.

With care, she shuffled towards her bathroom, her mom right behind her. While the tub filled, her mom handed her a couple of cold pills, just in case she admonished, and Sam downed them with another large glass of water.

"Thanks, mom," Sam finally managed to croak out. Her voice was scratchy and hoarse, barely above a loud whisper.

"Call me if you need help, alright?" asked her mom.

Sam nodded and slipped out of her pajamas and into the hot bath water after her mom had shut the door. The cold medicine seemed to be quick to do its thing as the heat of the water soaked into her tight muscles. After only a minute she was feeling more awake and her headache was subsiding. Feeling better, Sam thought back to her second, just as vivid dream. The figure… it had been Cody. She knew it was his laugh she had heard. He had been the one that had been reaching out for her, then he'd been ripped away from her.

The dreams were so real it felt like losing him a second time. Another sob threatened to escape up her aching throat and she wiped tears away from her puffy eyes. It wasn't fair. She had just gotten him back! Clearing her throat, she lay her head back against the bathtub rim. The water felt so good, but she refused to fall asleep. Sleeping didn't do her boyfriend or friends any good. She needed to call Cody's parents and see if they had any news. She wanted to call Jess's dad and see if he had any updates. Mostly she just wanted to feel useful and like she could actually help.

'Cody,' she thought, 'where are you?'

A small tingling at the back of her mind had her reaching up and rubbing the back of her neck. She closed her eyes and thought of her boyfriend's sea green ones.

The tingling grew stronger and then it was as if a wall in her mind had been brought down.

'Sam….'

Her name was faint, but she would know that voice anywhere, even in her thoughts.

"Cody?" Her eyes flew open as she said his name out load. She was still alone in the bathroom, but she was sure it had been Cody.

Closing her eyes again, she focused all her attention on picturing her boyfriend, tail and all, and sending out her thoughts to him. 'Cody?'

'Sam!'

It was him! She could hear him!

'Cody! Where are you?' She felt like she was yelling at the universe.

'I'm…,' there was a horrible, pregnant pause, 'Sea Haven. Jess is here, and Sean….'

His voice faded out again.

Sea Haven? 'Cody! Are you okay?'

His thought was slow to come. 'Drugged. Needle in arm. Can't move.' Distorted and jumbled images of a lab, people and an all-encompassing numbness filtered into Sam's mind.

'Sean…like me…okay…hurt….help….'

She couldn't make sense of the mixture of blurred words, feelings, and images that bombarded her mind. Wincing, she sat forward in the water, grasping her head. The headache that had been ebbing was throbbing now.

'Cody, calm down. It'll be okay. I'm going to find you, I promise.'

'No!' That thought came through louder. Then a softer one, 'My fault. Sean.'

Sam gasped at the image of Sean with a silver and green tail that filled her mind. 'He's…'

Feelings of sadness and horror, mixed together with that numbness, filled Sam's head again.

'How?' she thought back.

She could still feel Cody there, but he didn't respond for a long time. 'I…charge…everyone…danger…sorry….'

She couldn't make sense of it. 'Cody!' She called to him again. She could feel him slipping away this time. 'Cody!' she called again, not wanting to lose him.

One last image filled her mind and Sam gasped as the connection broke.

For a long minute she sat still in the water, staring at the tiled wall across from her. The water had gone lukewarm and it no longer comforted her. She knew that face. Only from pictures, and he was definitely a lot older now, but she knew exactly who it was.

"Grandpa?"

-TSLOF-

Doctor May stood over Cody. The young merman was staring up at him blankly, slack in the water, blinking ever so slowly as the drug coursed through his body. He hated that they'd needed to resort to this setup for him. It seemed the boy was determined to cause trouble. The way everyone in the lab was telling it, Cody had tried to shock all of them.

It was now evening, and the tank was still being cleared away. Dr. May glanced at it, half impressed. It would have taken a massive surge to break such thick glass. Cody was more dangerous than they had thought. Perhaps they had always been underestimating what merpeople were capable of. One thing had become very certain to him and Abigail. Once they had the cure, Cody would be sent back to his kind with a message. No merperson was to come on or near land again.

"Lindy?" Dr. May called over his shoulder.

A tapping of shoes headed his way then the younger blonde was at his side. "Yes, Chris?"

"Any progress on his test samples?" asked the doctor.

Sighing, Lindy handed him the tablet she'd been working on. "Yes, but it won't be much use to us. His DNA is extraordinary. It would be an understatement to say the world has never seen anything like it before. However, it's quite complex. If he had been mostly human, we could compare it to the mappings we've gathered from all of us… but sir," she paused, staring down at the merman. "He has genes I've never seen before. The sequencing is so unique. It will take us decades to be able to understand it. Also, without other true specimen samples, I don't think we will be able to create any sort of gene map to start finding a way to reverse what's happened to all of us."

Dr. May tapped through the collected notes that had been made in the last 24 hours. Anyone who was free to help, which was almost everybody at the facility, was working in some way to understand the samples they had collected. He dismissed Lindy as he sat in a chair nearby the tank Cody lay in.

The differences between Cody's and Sean's samples were obvious. Sean seemed to have what almost looked like a virus working through his system. But the strangest part was it only appeared in the samples taken from his scales and tail. It didn't show in his blood at all. It was almost as if the change was just affecting certain organs, giving him the appearance of being a merman.

The sample they had from Cody was very strange, as Lindy had confirmed. His DNA was nothing any of them had experience with. It was neither human nor fish. He truly was something completely separate. While Cody looked like he could belong to both species, in actuality he was neither. In fact, the more Dr. May looked at the results, the more he was convinced that studying Cody was going to be of no use to them. The world was far from ethical testing of mixing foreign animal DNA with that of human. It was an untried field and Dr. May had no interest in playing around with viruses that would alter people's DNA.

Rather, it was Sean's samples that he looked at closer. The virus like DNA codes that were in Sean seemed to react to water and electricity differently from that of Cody's samples. Where Cody's samples stabilized when exposed to water and electricity, a combination that seemed to be the catalyst that had jump started his change, Sean's was quite different.

Water, of any kind, seemed to be the catalyst for Sean's samples. It didn't matter the salinity or temperature. When Sean's samples were exposed to water, the DNA seemed to unzip then rezip with the implanted DNA from the virus like cells. That's when he would change. Take them out of water, and they did the reverse, becoming human once again. It was really no different from the rest of them. Sean just had so much of this foreign DNA flooding his cells they could finally identify it.

An idea, like an insistent itch, nagged at him. What was it? Opening the video from when Cody had changed, and then to when he had shocked Sean, he finally felt the puzzle pieces fall into place.

"Lindy!"

Coming back over, she gave Dr. May a curious look. He was smiling.

"Yeah?"

"What happens when we introduce electricity to one of Sean's samples?" asked Dr. May.

"I don't believe we've tried that one yet. We can give it a test though," said Lindy.

Nodding vigorously, Dr. May stood and followed her to a lab bench. "I think Sean's DNA is the key to this. But it has to be a sample that has the foreign DNA."

Standing over a microscope, Lindy grabbed a slide that had been prepared with a sample from Sean and inserted it under the lens. Twisting the nobs, she nodded as the individual cells came into focus. Darting away for a moment, she came back with a small power source and voltage clamps. Nodding to Dr. May, she touched the wire to the sample as he peered into the microscope.

His small gasp seemed to echo around the room.

"Extraordinary," Dr. May whispered. "It's amazing."

Lindy switched him and they did the experiment again. She laughed as she watched the change take place. They had it!

"Someone, get me Dr. Wheatley!" Dr. May yelled. "We've got it!"

The door to the pool swung open and Dr. May heard other gasps, these of disbelief. Lindy tapped his shoulder and grudgingly he once again looked up from the microscope.

"Sean?" Lindy took a step towards the lanky boy.

With a towel wrapped around his waist, Sean strode into the lab like he owned it.

"If you all don't mind, I would really like some clothes," snarked Sean.

Nobody moved.

Looking from the two samples, to Sean, back to the samples, Dr. May let out the biggest laugh he had in years. Moving as fast as he could, the older man ran up to the young boy and threw his arms around him in a gigantic hug.

"You!" Dr. May pulled back, holding sharply to Sean's shoulders. "It wasn't Cody, it was you!"

Shaken and weirded out, Sean pushed out of the doctor's grasp, taking several steps back as he struggled to keep his towel from slipping.

"Back off, doc!"

"Yes, Chris. What is the cause…"Abigail paused as she stepped farther into the lab. Initially, she had been unable to see who the older man had been grasping. Now, with Sean in full view, her jaw dropped open.

"Impossible!" She strode forward, her hands shaking.

Sean rolled his eyes and took a couple more steps back. "Yes, it's amazing, whatever. Can someone please get me a pair of pants at least?"

Lindy pushed a tech toward the door and they begrudgingly left to get some clothes for the boy. She grabbed her tablet from the lab bench and began furiously typing in notes and data.

"How did this happen?" Abigail asked, turning from Sean and staring at Dr. May. "What happened in the last hour?"

Dr. May continued staring at Sean. "We have an answer. Sean… he's the cure!"

-TSLOF-

The rest of the night at Sea Haven was noisy. Everyone was dashing back and forth. Everyone, except for Jess. Having been permitted to leave his room, he was now sitting next to Cody's tank at the back of the lab, out of way and trying to keep them from doing anything else to his best friend. Whatever they had given him must have been some nasty stuff, but Jess was the only one who seemed worried. Everybody else there had much more to worry about. Jess had been listening closely to the conversations that were going on. His mother had even handed him a tablet, to stop his questioning, so he could pour over the info himself.

First, Jess had been shocked to learn that Cody wasn't human or fish, but something completely different. Obviously, there was DNA in common with human DNA, but his species wasn't part human like they had all assumed. Secondly, and just as amazing, they had found the cure. That's why everyone was awake and lining up to get in the lab. It had taken a little bit of tweaking, but his mom and Dr. May had figured it out. Sean being able to change from merman to human had been the key. It showed that the change was, somewhat speaking, just superficial. Only certain organs changed when in contact with water. Watching the video of Cody shocking Sean to initiate that change had told Dr. May what they needed to do.

From how Jess was understanding it, the shock from a merperson altered pockets of cells within a human's body. These pockets mutated into virus like cells with DNA that could rapidly alter a person's cell structure when in contact with a catalyst, which happened to be water. Because humans and merpeople were so genetically unrelated, the change wasn't stable. Rather, only pockets of cells, and mostly those affect organs like lungs and skin, would undergo the mutation.

When Sean had first been affected by Cody, it had been such a shock to his system that it had nearly killed him. When Cody had shocked him a second time, it had acted like a stabilizer, especially since Sean had been in water.

But it was still just superficial. Once Sean had dried himself off, he was human. But only for an hour or so when the mutated cells started resisting what used to be their original state. That's what they all experienced and why they all felt compelled to swim or why they became sick when away from water for too long. Sean had been in the lab when he'd begun feeling ill and had needed to return to the pool. Once wet he had quickly grown a tail again. Now, he was back in the lab, the first volunteer for the final cure.

Electricity, Dr. May had realized, was the reverse catalyst. Naturally, humans avoided shocking themselves, so they had never thought to explore that route before. To human cells, it was damaging. But to merpeople, who generated their own electric current, it was completely different. By reintroducing an electric current to the mutated human cells when completely dry, they simple overloaded. Their dual nature was too unstable, and the mutated cells would reverse back to their original state. The mutation actually unzipped right out of the DNA code and turned into useless proteins that were cycled out by the cells' natural regeneration.

It had taken the better part of the evening and late night for Dr. May and Dr. Wheatley to figure out the correct voltage to use. The tricky part was it had to be strong enough to affect the mutated cells, but not so strong that it stopped their hearts in the process. As long as the catalyst of water was missing, the effect of what happened to them could be undone.

At least, that's what the simple test samples had shown so far. Jess knew Dr. May and many others had been at Sea Haven for decades. How integrated had this mutation become to their cell structure? Would age matter? Would it actually work? Jess didn't have any answers. He'd been smart enough to help Cody recognize what was happening to him when he had first changed, but this was all beyond him. He was still in middle school and completely out of his depth here. All he cared about at the moment was his friend. Now that they all realized they didn't actually need Cody and they had abandoned him. Jess turned down to look at his friend and was surprised to see his eyes open, watching him.

"Cody!" Jess whispered, trying to hide his excitement.

Blinking slowly, Cody tried to stretch and then winced. His muscles were spasming.

"Hey, take it easy. I don't know what they gave you, but it wasn't good."

Cody was staring at him again, this time frowning.

Jess stared back, waiting for his friend to talk to him. Nothing came through.

Eyes wide, Jess knelt farther forward, panicking. "Cody, are you trying to talk to me?"

Nodding, Cody shut his eyes as his body once again shook.

"I don't hear you!" Jess stood up, about ready to rush to his mom, then stopped, frozen in fear. Bryce stood at the end of the tank, a needle in hand, injecting it into Cody's tail. "No!" Jess yelled, lunging forward.

Blocking him easily, Bryce depressed the needle's plunger completely, then removed the needle. "Sorry, Jess. We can't have him conscious. Not now. He's too dangerous. When it's safe, we'll let him back up."

Horrified, Jess slumped into his seat. Cody was in trouble and he couldn't help him. A massive wave of guilt had him placing his head in his hands. He was the reason Cody was here. His best friend was nothing more than a lab rat to these people and it was all his fault. Glowering, he stared at his mom. Abigail, he told himself. That was her name. At times she had seemed tender and kind, but she was not his mother anymore. She had become hard and cold from what had done to her. She let it hurt her, and now she used that hurt to manipulate Jess. Well, he wasn't having anymore of it. His mother had died all those years ago. The women she was now was a stranger to him.

Sitting back in his chair, Jess crossed his arms and watched the commotion that swirled in the lab around him. He was going to stay there as long as they let them, and if they tried to make him leave, he would put up a fight. He was determined to stay there until he got his friend back. He had a lot to make up to him.

I hope you are all practicing social distancing and frequently washing your hands with soap and water while we go through this COVID-19 ordeal together. Since I'm pretty much stuck at home 24/7 now, I happen to have more time to write! Silver linings, right? Look for the next chapter soon! Stay safe, y'all!